Send site updates to people on MailChimp list

[wbushey]

Our MailChimp list has almost 500 people who want to be informed about civic tech news and events. That's exactly what we post to opentwincities.org, so we should start feeding opentwincities.org posts to the MailChimp list.

There are RSS feeds of all posts and just events that we can use to feed a MailChimp campaign.

One complicating factor is how the site treats events. Events are a category of posts that are dated to the day of the event (i.e. the Event post for Hack for MN 2014 is dated June 21st, 2014, the first day of Hack for MN 2014). All other posts are dated to whenever the post is actually published. On the site, and in the RSS feed, Event posts mix with regular posts, are are sorted by date. This means that event posts often show up at the top, since they are often in the future, and it is quite common for the front page of opentwincities.org to have multiple up coming events listed at the top of latest posts, pushing down 'newer' general posts (posts that have actually been published more recently).

This prompts a few questions:

1. How does MailChimp handle this? Will it include future event posts in emails? Does that mean subscribers will receive an email everyday with the event post until the event occurs?
2. More generally (for the MailChimp list and the site), is there a better way to notify users/subscribers about events? There's a certain convenience for us as content creators, and for people following OTC, to having Event posts included with general posts, creating one stream for updates of all types. But, as mentioned above, this causes events to overshadow new content. It also doesn't do much to differentiate events in a list of all posts.

[wbushey]

I've setup a test RSS driven MailChimp campaign going just to myself, to see what exactly MailChimp does with event posts.

[wbushey]

OK, I've received the MainChimp campaign a couple of times now. Both times it included a Event post for an event happening a couple of weeks from now, which leads me to think that the campaign will always include posts dated today and any day in the future.